


Tell Me Again

by SummerFrost



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: (Past) Physical Abuse, 5+1 Things, Biphobia, Coming Out, Homophobia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-28
Updated: 2017-03-28
Packaged: 2018-10-11 22:57:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10476423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SummerFrost/pseuds/SummerFrost
Summary: Five conversations Kent Parson never wants to have again, plus one he could have forever.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Uhh I'm not sure what this is but here take it.
> 
> Thanks to shipped-goldstandard for the beta <3

“Sweetie, you know I’ll love you no matter what,” his mother says. “I just—don’t take this the wrong way—I just hope you end up with a girl.”

There isn’t a lump in Kent’s throat but it feels dry, like words would scrape away the lining of his esophagus on the way out and he’d cough up blood-flaked dust. He manages, “Why?” and takes the next breath through his nose.

Ma reaches for her cup of coffee and her fingers have wrinkles around the knuckles Kent doesn’t remember seeing there before. He wonders if she’s getting old. She takes a long drink before explaining with earnest, “I just—I want you to have a normal family, baby. Don’t you wanna get married and have kids one day?”

Kent is nineteen and reeling from the smothering weight of everything he’s ever wanted and the ragged pain of the tips of his ribs digging down into the pulsing flesh where a heart used to be.

Jack Zimmermann looked beautiful in his hospital gown.

“Of course,” Kent answers. It doesn’t scare him that he can’t tell if he’s lying.

“I just want you to be happy,” Ma tells him, and he wonders if she’ll outlive him. “Tell me about Vegas.”

 

~*~

 

“So like, you’re still into fucking chicks, right?” Ratchet asks.

Kent switches the blender onto the highest setting and watches the blades shred up the kale and fruit and ice into a shattered mess that will feel like slime against his tongue. “Uh, yeah.”

Ratchet says something else but Kent can’t hear him over the blender. He turns it off and Ratchet repeats, “Why don’t you just do that then?”

“What d’you mean?” Kent abandons the smoothie but doesn’t turn to look at him, either, fingers thrumming nervously on the counter and eyes fixed on a drop of water rolling down the side of his sink.

Troy yells at something on the TV from the other room. Ratchet says, “I mean, I don’t really get what does it for you about dicks anyway, but like—even if I did, I wouldn’t, you know? ‘S not worth all the shit that comes with it.”

Kent’s hand drifts down to brush his fingers against the top of his phone. He doesn’t mention his weird Twitter feud with Bittle or the way his heart beats a little harder every time his fingers linger over the ‘like’ button on one of Bittle’s selfies, or how he nearly cried when Bittle sent him a DM that said _‘why, Mr. Parson, if I didn’t know better I’d think you were flirting with me,’_ and he found the courage to answer, _‘haha maybe I am.’_

He doesn’t say anything at all.

Ratchet says, “I swear that wasn’t an anal joke.”

“Dude, what the fuck?” Kent answers, and forces himself to laugh—because the way he dreams about Bittle moving between his thighs and stuttering his name isn’t supposed to make his toes curl or his ribs feel brittle and hollow—isn’t supposed to be the ghost of a thing that made his blood feel solid and whole like nothing has in years.

Troy cranes his neck over the back of the couch and shouts, “Ratch, bro, haven’t you ever had your prostate massaged? It’s fucking life changing, dude.”

“I _wasn’t making_ —” Ratchet insists, then stops up short. “Wait, what?”

Troy turns down the volume on the TV and launches into a rant about anal play that’s honestly, like, way too much information about what he and Shani get up to in bed but Ratchet seems fascinated by. Kent tunes them out in favor of pulling up his private messages with Bittle.

 **_@kvpurrson90 (5:03 pm):_ ** _Currently listening to 2 straight dudes talking about the wonders of the prostate_

 **_@omgcheckplease (5:04 pm):_ ** _That’s nice. Last week one of my freshmen asked me what ass tasted like_

 **_@omgcheckplease (5:04 pm):_ ** _Like those were his exact words, bless his fucking heart_

Kent snorts and slides down to the ground in the kitchen, leans his head back against the wall and stares up at the half-blended smoothie sitting on the counter; it’s turning a little brown and he should probably put it back in the fridge if he isn’t gonna drink it now. He runs a hand through his hair and looks back down at his phone instead.

 **_@kvpurrson90 (5:06 pm):_ ** _Hahahaha priceless_

 **_@kvpurrson90 (5:06 pm):_ ** _Hey would u wanna skype sometime_

 

~*~

 

“I mean, I just—I’d get it if you wanted to keep seeing other people,” Bittle says casually. He’s still breathing heavily and the come hasn’t finished drying on his stomach and Kent’s thighs are twitching from riding him so hard they both nearly passed out.

Kent looks over and traces the flushed line of Bittle’s collarbone with his eyes, the way his chest rises up to meet it and sinks back down to reveal the sharp cut of the bone again, the pooling purple-pink bruise in the hollow at the edge where it melts into his throat.

“’S that what you want?” he asks, his tongue sticking against his teeth.

Bittle’s cheeks are pink and his eyes are warm and vulnerable in a way his voice wasn’t, thick with something Kent wishes he could shoot into his veins. “Not really. But, um—wouldn’t it—it’d be easier for you, wouldn’t it? If you were still…with women.”

Kent is twenty-six and it’s the easiest thing he’s done in seven years to lean across the bed and kiss the tremble out of Bittle’s bottom lip.

 

~*~

 

“It fucking sucks, I get it,” Shani agrees. She and Kent are draped across opposite ends of the sectional in the living room, feet nudged up together in the middle.

Kent can hear the sounds of laughter filtering in from the front yard, where Troy is playing catch with Josey while Shawn watches and rolls his Tonka truck around in the grass, and he takes a moment to smile before he tells her, “And I feel like an asshole for complaining about it, you know?”

Shani hums in agreement, twirling a curl around her finger absentmindedly, but prompts, “How come?”

Kent pushes air out through his nose and tilts his face up to the ceiling. “I mean, like, my mom says dumb shit about wanting grandkids but she never fucking threw me out or anything, you know? And guys still change in front of me in the locker room and I haven’t heard anyone say ‘faggot’ on my side of the ice in—uh, like all season. And it’s like—shouldn’t I be fucking grateful?”

“For being treated like a person?” Shani asks, but her voice is more sad than incredulous. Kent closes his eyes and shrugs, feels the drag of his shoulders against the suede couch. “Pretty low bar, kid.”

On a different afternoon, Kent might chirp her back about being an old woman or whine good-naturedly about being a few terrifying years from thirty himself, but—

“I think I’m falling in love with him,” Kent says, eyes tracing the movement of the ceiling fan cutting arcs through the air in a blur of molded plastic.

Shani pushes up onto her forearms and asks, “Wanna know a secret?”

Kent sits up too, palms splayed on the cushions under him and the tendons in his arms trembling just a little bit from the confession, like he’d reached in and lifted the weight of it from his chest as a physical thing. “Uh, yeah.”

Shani’s eyes are bright with conviction and the curve of her lips is smug. “That’s all that matters,” she says. “Fuck everything else.”

 

~*~

 

“Honey, he’s great. I really do think that,” Ma insists, her voice pitched low but heavy, so it won’t carry back into the other room where Bitty is laughing, hands waving through the air as he tells some story about his old college team to Izzy. “I just…wonder if this kind of thing is…worth it.”

Kent feels his stomach shrivel, the familiar curling feeling like his entire gut might strangle itself in a fucking spectacular display of self-destruction. He counters sharply, defensively, “What the fuck does that mean?”

 _“Kent,”_ she snaps, and her voice creaks over the word like she’s used it too many times. He takes the rebuke with a pouting lip and crossed arms and does not apologize. Ma rubs at the wrinkles between her eyebrows and says tiredly, “I just don’t get why you’re so—you make everything so _hard,_ Kenny. You could have a nice girl with you—someone you can bring to skating and take out to dinner—and you wouldn’t worry about rumors, or—”

“I love him,” Kent cuts in, and he hates how much like begging it sounds—like he’s laying an offering at her feet she could kick aside. “What the fuck don’t you get about that?”

“You could love a girl,” she points out, and Kent wishes she’d slapped him instead.

_Yeah, and you could’ve loved some bastard who didn’t break my arm when I was seven, who didn’t—_

And Kent wishes the thing that holds his tongue was that he loves his mother or he doesn’t want to hurt her or he knows it won’t help a fucking thing to do it. All of those things are true—they just aren’t enough.

What’s enough is that Bitty runs a hand through his hair and it flashes in the light and flops back down into his face a little, because he always fucks with the mousse he puts in it when he worries at it like that—the same way his bottom lip is always a little dark and chapped from the chewing of his teeth—and Kent can say, “I could. And I love him.”

“If you wanna get married—”

Kent interrupts her again. “I’m marrying Bitty. That’s why—that’s why we’re here. Don’t ruin the speech at dinner—he’s super proud of it.” He takes a breath, makes sure he keeps his voice down. “Look, Ma, I know you think I’m a big deal and shit but no one’s looking for my fuckin’ marriage certificate, okay? And, like, you ever think maybe it’d be worth it, even if they were? That I—that maybe he loves me and I’m so fucking _happy_ for the first time in—Christ, Ma, I’m happy.”

She’s quiet for a long time, gaze drifting between Kent’s clenched jaw and swimming eyes and Bitty’s bright laugh, his glowing smile. There isn’t much Kent wouldn’t do to be back over there, hand on the small of Bitty’s back and nose brushing through his hair, smiling and laughing and warm in the way Bitty always makes him—like he’s swallowed down stardust through Bitty’s tongue.

“Guess you won’t need grandma’s wedding ring,” Ma says, and Kent can’t tell if she’s disappointed or just pretending to be.

He surprises the hell out of himself by not really caring.

 

~*~

 

“Hey, you awake?” Bitty murmurs, brushing his fingers across Kent’s temple, a gentleness that makes Kent shiver.

Kent is maybe thirty percent awake. He flutters his eyelids against the sun creeping in through the curtains and makes a soft, indistinct sound in the back of his throat.

“I’m so in love with you,” Bitty whispers. His voice is filled with wonder, quiet and careful like the words are made of the eggshells he splits clean apart with the side of a fork when he’s baking. “I think I fall more in love with you all the time.”

Kent opens his eyes and smiles, cat-like and slow and like he could live like this forever, because he _could._  He says, “Tell me again.”

**Author's Note:**

> I love Kent Parson with my entire trash heart. Come scream with me about him [on Tumblr <3](http://yoursummerfrost.tumblr.com/)


End file.
